Humanities

September 17, 2009

In an effort to illustrate the sublime aestheticism of the Shimer classroom, I have essayed to capture some of the more salient moments of recent class discussions in that most ephemeral of poetic forms, the haiku. Feel free to contribute everybody. Also, to avoid in-joke snobbery in this public forum, the poet’s comments will be provided if solicited.

August 23, 2009

From time to time, we hope to post the thoughts of some of Shimer's great faculty members on this blog. Some may even join the ranks of our regular contributors. For now, Harold Stone, who you can read all about here, has shared these notes originally composed for the Gadfly, Shimer's newsletter for Weekend College, a program which allows adults to complete their undergraduate education in the Great Books here at Shimer.

Notes from the Director

Welcome to the Fall Semester of the
2009-2010 academic year. The Weekend College is approaching its
thirtieth year. At one time, the rule of thumb was not to trust
anyone over 30. I don’t know if the same skepticism was or should
be applied to institutions. As we approach the end of the Weekend
College’s third decade, I can tell you the Program is strong, our
continuing students have made remarkable achievements in one of the
most challenging programs of undergraduate instruction. Congratulations
to those who have completed their Area Comprehensive examinations and
to those who passed the Basic Studies Examination. Welcome to
our new students. I think you will agree as you get to know them that
they are interesting individuals full of promise. If reaching and passing
the thirty year mark is a passage perilous, I advise you to be confident
because of the quality of the company engaged in this venture and the
nobility of its purpose.

This year is the 200th anniversary
of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th of the publication
of his best known work, On the Origin of Species.
As we continue our contribution to the life of the mind and the development
of our own intellectual and spiritual resources, it is right to think
back on what binds us to and separates us from this past. To enter
the world of 1809 requires a far greater imaginative leap than that
of 1859, or so it seems to me. There is something seductive about
“The Masterpiece Theatre” presentation of the novels of Jane Austen,
Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Dickens that makes each of them so approachable
even palpable. This immediacy of the past can be deceptive.
To understand most things we need to withdraw from our immediate context
and radically slow down the pace of what we experience. This isn’t
primarily because ‘back then’ life was slower, though that may be
true. The primary reason to slow down is to allow us to stop, to pick
up objects, and to explore them in their complexity. You should
use the same standard when it comes to your class preparation and your
writing. Set aside more time then you think reasonable to get
your reading done and your papers written. Call it time to think,
time to day dream, your understanding of your readings will only improve
the longer you allow yourself to wander and wonder with them.
Great authors and great books often have the unsettling effect of making
you think they are speaking directly to you, and often that is true.
When you think you are succumbing to the power of an argument, beware
that you are loosing your critical judgment! Slow down.

On other matters, remember that after
the next Weekend College meeting on Sunday we will have the first meeting
of the Assembly, the governing body of the College. All staff
and students are members of the Assembly. Be sure to attend, consider
serving on one of the committees that govern the College.
If you have any difficulties with your ID or have any other problems
be sure to contact me.

Harold Stone

Director of the Weekend Program

Fact Checking: The Perspective of the
Great Books

Among the polymaths we study is the
seventeenth French writer Blaise Pascal. We read Pascal’s scientific
treatises on air pressure and the vacuum in Natural Sciences One; his
Pensées are a required text in Humanities Three. In 1656
Pascal began a project which perhaps really began as a series of actual
letters to an unnamed friend. In any event, in their published
form they are presented as a series of loosely connected letters which
describe the state of theological debate in Paris to someone remote
from the capital city. In their published form we know them as
The Provincial Letters. In this compact volume of 18 or 19
letters one reads a withering analysis of the state of the moral philosophy
and of the theological speculation practiced at France’s leading center
of religious thought, the Sorbonne. Not only does his work
deal with fundamental questions of integrity and moral purpose; his
irony is sublime, his wit is never merely corrosive or abusive, and
some of his passages will make you roar with laughter.

The recent debate concerning what actually
is being proposed in the healthcare legislation being considered by
Congress reminded me of the initial issue that begins The Provincial
Letters. What got Pascal started was what might seem an obscure
and insignificant matter. A couple of decades before a theologian
named Jansen had written a Latin treatise seeking to make a coherent
explanation of the various remarks of St. Augustine concerning grace,
and especially the saving grace God might give to individuals.
This was an important matter of contention between Protestants and Catholics
at this time as those of you who have already taken the class know from your reading of Max Weber in
Social Sciences One. It was also an internal dispute between the
different religious orders of the Catholic Church. In the rush
to discredit Jansen and his followers (whom we might regard as conservatives),
a group led by the Jesuits (whose position might be called liberal)
asserted that Jansen’s book contained four heinous propositions.
The Pope, on seeing the propositions, agreed; he condemned the
propositions and the book as heretical. Pascal and his friend
Arnauld had the further effrontery to point out that not only were these
statements not contained in Jansen’s text, the text clearly said the
opposite. To be sure, they agreed, if they had been in the text
they would have been heretical. The response of some of the Jesuits
was to argue that Arnauld and Pascal should be condemned for pointing
out that the passages couldn’t be found!

And, as you might suspect, this argument,
while it looked like it concerned theology was in fact a political quarrel
involving the prestige of the French King Louis XIV and the Papacy who
were allied to the flawed scholarship of the Jesuits. While these
connections are interesting, what Pascal goes on to show is the moral
bankruptcy behind the sloppy and unethical behavior of those who deliberately
misrepresent what they read, or worse what they claimed to have read.
He goes on to show that those who sponsored and affirmed these fabricated
propositions were part of an institution that promoted a rotten moral
code. Pascal did not hesitate to ridicule his adversaries and
succeeded in making them not only look silly but he also showed they
were merely petty men who were attempting to be bullies.

May 09, 2009

At least, it hasn't happened yet. But I did pull off some incredible feats involving turning out massive amounts of fiction.

I spent Hell Week finishing up my last paper for Hum2 and writing a script. 76 pages of script, to be exact. I've discovered that having crazy writing challenges such as NaNoWriMo and Script Frenzy at the end of the semester gives one a great incentive to actually get papers done on time. This makes Hell Week easy academically. However, putting off writing for the challenge until schoolwork was done made my week an interesting one, full of discoveries.

Discovery 1: Writing papers is much easier than I had originally thought. Trying to pull plot out of thin air makes the brain hurt. A lot. I'm still recovering a week later, though writing fiction for Writing Week probably didn't help any.

Discovery 2: Procrastination can be helpful. Yes, helpful. But only if you're writing fiction. Procrastination on papers is bad. I learned that one last semester. (Plus it gets in the way of the writing for fun!) When writing fiction, however, and with a scary deadline hovering, procrastination followed by a sudden rush to actually accomplish your goal inspires really wonderful things. This time around I was greeted with feuding deities that caused the world I was writing about to almost be destroyed, an unfortunate soul to be given omniscience (which subsequently drove her crazy), and both of my main characters turned out to be not important in the least and nearly died. It was epic. And it was a myth about why the moon has phases. A 100 page myth, that is. Most of it was written in... 48 hours?

Discovery 3: It is possible to write 40 pages in 7 hours. Granted, they lack in the quality, but it is entirely possible. First drafts of many things can be done this way, especially if they are drafts of six page papers instead of giant scripts. I can never blame lack of time on late papers again.

Discovery 4: I should not be given coffee. During the writing sprint, I was given some coffee by my pal Kurt who works at Global Grounds. He knows I don't like coffee. He heard about my intent to write 76 pages in a very small amount of time. So he tried to disguise some coffee for me. He didn't succeed, which is all the better, because the few sips I had turned me loopy. It was... an interesting experience. One I don't intend to repeat. Coffee works miracles for some people when they have lots to do. Just not me.

Discovery 5: Things I read in class influence the way I write. This was evident to me in the short stories I wrote for Writing Week. I think it was mainly Dostoevsky and Flannery O'Connor. Maybe Kafka. (Also Terry Pratchett, but that wasn't reading for class.) It was interesting rereading what I'd written.

I'm sure there are more things I've discovered, but I can't think of which ones are relevant. I'm having fun exploring the writing process though, and I'm itching to write more. Despite Cassie's worry that I was going to fiction myself out, I seem to have opened the creative door in my head, and my passion for writing quality (as opposed to the quantity of NaNoWriMo and Screnzy) has been revived.

April 22, 2009

I was asked recently what my favorite books are in the Shimer curriculum. Of course, that's as easy a question to answer as: So, have you stopped beating your wife yet? (Just try answering that yes or no.) But I have given the matter some thought, and after a lot of painful agonizing and trying to ignore sighs and indignant yells of other titles on my bookshelf, I've come up with a top five list.

This is entirely subject to change of opinion, time, experience, etc.

1. Godel's Proof. This is the culmination of Integrative Studies 2, and, I would argue, one of the most important books you'll ever read at Shimer. It refuted the idea of absolute mathematical truths and essentially proved that you could not have a non-axiomatic system. I translate that in practical terms to say that you will always have assumptions in an argument; you cannot prove everything. It's a challenging read, even the summary of it that we do cover (the full proof is too complex to get into in the amount of time that we have to read it), but I feel its implications appeal even to the non-mathematically minded. I have been thinking of things in terms of systems and axioms ever since I read this. It applies to any analysis of reading that I care to do.

2. Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. One James Joyce and one Virginia Woolf, I include these together because they were both parts of an elective that I took last year. My mind exploded with implications for fiction and literature after I read both of these. They've inspired thoughts about how human minds work, and how, as an author, I can communicate this in literary characters. Both novels do stupendous jobs of chronicling one day of ordinary life in such a way as to celebrate that; as much as we as human beings strive for something "special," often our day-to-day life is fuller than any extraordinary event we can possibly imagine.

3. What Is Life? and Mind and Matter. This is part of the Natural Sciences 4 course, and you read it towards the end of the class. Erwin Schrodinger is an amazingly readable scientific author, and while I enjoyed reading his explanations of cellular processes as connected to chemistry (part of What is Life? and the only thing we were actually supposed to read), I found his writing in Mind and Matter to be absolutely brain-blowing. He talks about the separation of mind and body as the inherent assumption in modern science--and how that doesn't exist, and what the implications of that are in terms of how we approach the world and the ideal of "objectivity" in science. It's the best reading I ever read by accident as I thought it was assigned.

4. The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Another Natural Sciences reading, this one from Nat Sci 2. Maybe it seems odd to have Jane Goodall on my top five list, but the study of chimpanzees for me holds a lot of clues as to how we evolved into the human beings we are today. It fits for me the way Shimer studies ideas from the past in order to understand the present; I feel I gained insight into possible interpretations of human nature from reading about chimpanzees. The most interesting speculation I had, that Goodall mentions at the end, is that it was primarily war that caused chimps to evolve into human beings: the chimps that were better-organized and more able to fight and kill off rivals were the ones that survived. If human beings evolved by conflict, what does that say about our current course, and what we can do in the future?

5. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. This choice is equal parts pleasure as much as impact on my thought. It's the first thing you read in Humanities 2, and you spend a week or two discussing selected poems from the anthology. I wish we read more poetry, but this part of Hum 2 was blissful for me. While it's all western poetry, of course, it's got a huge range of authors and dates (including a lot of modern poetry), and we picked from all over the spectrum. I believe in poetry as much as expository writing as a mode of communicating philosophy. But unlike exposition, poetry deliberately lends itself to a wide variety of interpretations, and in a way stimulates the thought in a way that straight-out philosophical prose does not.

These are what I've read so far that have either blown my mind away or changed the way I think. I am always up for discussion on any of these.

January 27, 2009

So, last semester wasn't the best of semesters for me. I didn't do as well as I could have, but I passed all my classes and learned a thing or two. And with the memory of my struggles last semester fresh in my mind, I came back for my second semester of college.

Already, I can tell it will be great. I'm not sure what changed, but I'm finding myself contributing to the discussion more and more in not just one, but all of my classes. I absolutely love Humanities 2, as we've started out with poetry, which is both fun to read and talk about. I think I may have surprised my class with my passion for "The Red Wheelbarrow," which stems from my background on a small family farm.

Integrated Studies 2 is a ton of fun, for me at least. We've been working with simple logic problems so far, which are easy enough for me as I do logic problems for fun and on a fairly regular basis. But what really makes the class great is when we sit around that table and puzzle out exactly WHY something works the way it does, or discussing the independence of certain postulates and coming to unexpected conclusions.

Then there is Natural Sciences 1. This class, for me at least, is exactly what I had expected when I came to Shimer. Twice now I've had my brain melted by hypothetical situations based upon Presocratic schools of thought. It sounds terrible, but having your brain melted is actually a wonderful, almost magical experience. It happens when you start thinking on a higher level than you ever have, and you wear your brain cells out trying to find an answer to a question that seems unanswerable. I know I'm thinking when I come out of class unable to think anymore. The first time it happened, I was grateful for my Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule, as it gave my brain a chance to rest and recover between classes. Once I was capable of serious thought again, I found myself piecing things together in my mind with more ease. I'm actually noticing the difference, and it's terribly exciting.

So I know I'm going to have a great semester this time around. I'm confident that I'll do well, contribute more to the discussion in every class, and will learn a little bit more about how to think. Things are looking up for me!

Now all I have to do is find something to do around campus so I can keep busy on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The hunt is on, and I hear there are free dancing lessons somewhere every week.

December 17, 2008

That seems to be a fairly frequently asked question, and it's one that I've wondered about myself. The stereotype is unfortunately one of Western books written by DWM ("dead white men"), and for the most part the traditional Great Books curriculum (if there even is such a thing) includes some 450 odd-works that whose authors fit that category.

I say this spurred by the interest of a book someone recently brought to my attention called A Great Idea At the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam. Now I haven't read it, yet, but I did read the reviews of it and it mentioned the two people who were instrumental in starting the Great Books program in the University of Chicago back in the 1950s: Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. Both of those names are familiar to me because Shimer still follows a large part of the Hutchins plan in its curriculum (in fact, one of our classrooms is named after him) and Mortimer J. Adler (along with Charles Van Doren) wrote a book called How to Read a Book, which I very much enjoyed. (It is an odd sort of thing to read a book about reading books, but it bears reading more than once. Sometimes older, "classical" books are frustrating because we haven't the slightest clue how to approach them. How to Read a Book gives you all that and more.)

Hutchins and Adler put 443 books they named the canon of western literature into 54 volumes, which they then published and sold door-to-door, trying to spread knowledge to the greater population outside of academia. (An interesting connection I found: my calculus teacher, from IIT this past semester, sold these volumes as a door-to-door salesman when he was younger.) A Great Idea at the Time chronicles that history and its apparent demise. Reading the review brought to my mind a great deal of arguments that have been made against pursuing the Great Books education:

1) It's not practical in the least.2) Everything's outdated. I mean, who reads Newton and Fourier nowadays? Their achievements are embedded into our scientific history, but no one needs their experiments anymore.3) They don't promote the cultural diversity that's the vogue nowadays. As mentioned above, the authors are almost all of them DWM.4) They are difficult to approach and sometimes near impossible to wade through. I dare you to read Kant without once ranting at him.

My defense of what has arguably become my life in the past year and a half:

1) Practical is admittedly one of the arguments most thrown against four years of reading books. But our definitions of practicality usually align with learning the skills and facts that will enable us to get a job. Reading the Great Books, by contrast, will not help one get a job. This is not true. If you want to fight facts with facts, I could say there's a lot of studies out there that have shown that employers in the scientific and medical fields are actually looking for applicants with prior degrees in the liberal arts (going on to specialized and graduate school afterward, of course) because they know that these people are better critical thinkers, better analyzers, open-minded and aware of what's going on in the world. Or I could say that the better the books that you read, the better your writing becomes: Great Books have launched the career of many a journalist, a writer, a reporter. Others have gone on to become lawyers, teachers, business owners; just about anything you can imagine. The Great Books education is not "practical" in the narrow definition because no, it does not teach you the latest in computer science, nor does it require you to memorize the periodic table or quantum formulas. But it teaches you to see the connections between things, the evolution of ideas across the ages, and knowing this you can more easily see how our world works today. It gives you the critical eye needed to cut through a lot of the information pills that our media force-feeds us today and pay attention to what's actually going on in the world, to make your own decisions based on primary sources rather than second- or third-hand sources. And, one thing that I feel is uniquely Shimer--and I freely admit my bias here, as well as lack of experience elsewhere--it helps you to discover what it is you really want to do. Many colleges that you enter are specialized to some degree or another, and you have to choose a degree about halfway through. Shimer's education is general all the way down the line, and you don't have to choose what you want to do so quickly. Reading what I have, both in and out of Shimer's curriculum, has pointed me down a lot of avenues I might not have otherwise explored. But that's for another post.

2) Outdated, yes. Useless? No. Much of science that I was taught throughout my public school years involved memorizing formulas, with little emphasis on how the ideas actually came about. Reading the really, really old scientists, even the ones that seem ridiculous (the pre-Socratics: the world is made out of earth, air, fire and water? Hah!), allows you to trace the evolution of ideas and really know why we are where we are today in science, politics, humanities and so many other areas. I think about it in the same way I think about math: if you know how to derive a million formulas from a single base, then you really only have to remember one thing.

3) Now, while this charge is true of some Great Books curricula, it is certainly not true of Shimer's. I'll name a few authors I've read here that are definitely not D, W, M or otherwise: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Mary Wollstonecraft, W.E.B. DuBois, Jane Goodall, Ruth Benedict, Carol Gilligan... and many others I have not yet had the chance to read. Shimer doesn't stick to the Great Books of the Western World canon outlined fifty years ago; it constantly challenges and updates itself. We read modern, female, minority authors that few, if any, other Great Books colleges include. The importance of that? The Great Books are not dead. The conversations and the writings continue still.

4) This is why we approach the books as a group. I admit, the first time I read through Jame Joyce's Ulysses I was hitting my head on the nearest wall. But when I came into class and we were all equally confused, we came out of our confusion together to some kind of understanding, and the effort it took to work through it made it seem even better: my mind was stretched, and my world expanded. I believe that the basic mentality towards many books written today is that they should be automatically intelligible to everyone, and books written a long time ago are only for smart people to read. Neither statement is true. It's the book that you struggle with before understanding that sticks with you the most, and I really think that almost anyone who puts their mind to it can, with aid, get through a lot of the classical books written centuries ago. It doesn't mean that you have to enjoy all of them (I certainly don't). But there is so much to be gotten from them that you can't simply not try.

Reading these is what brings the Shimer community together as a whole. Whatever other differences in views and opinion we might have, we've all read the same thing. That, to me, is one of the greatest aspects of Shimer's education.

December 13, 2008

I've mentioned already that I am a
junior at Shimer, however most of the other Shimerians here with me
in Oxford are in their last year and are thus working on their Senior
theses. The idea behind the thesis is that it affords Shimer students
a culminating opportunity to really do substantive work on a project
or idea that we are passionate about in a way that draws on
everything we've learned while at the college. Among some of the
really interesting things my comrades here are doing are theses
involving research projects, recording music, or translating poetry.
All of this puts me in mind to start pondering what I think I'd like
to do for my own thesis next year and just this week I think I've
begun to develop an idea that I am really excited about.

I've always been really interested in
vision, the visual arts and all the fertile connections there are to
be made between them and philosophy. I am especially interested in
the way that our ideas about seeing get used as a kind of metaphor
for both knowledge and illusion. These kinds of associations can be
traced back at least to Plato, who, in his famous “Allegory of the
Cave” in the Republic used the play of shadows cast on a cave's
wall to illustrate the deceptive world of appearances on earth and
the symbol of blinding sunlight to represent the eternal truth of the
forms.

But I think what I would particularly
like to explore in a thesis is the way slightly more modern
philosophers use the model of sight to try to understand the problems
of human consciousness, or, more specifically what many 19th
and 20th century German philosophers would begin to call
'false consciousness' or 'ideology.'

Take, for example, Ludwig Fuerbach's
musing on the eye in his book The Essence of Christianity.“The
eye looks into the starry heavens [and] gazes at that light [and]
sees its own nature and its own origin. Hence Man [sic]
elevates himself above the earth only with the eye.” Without going
into to too much detail about his philosophy, I can say that
Feuerbach uses this model of the human eye, seeing it's own divine
nature in the heavens, to propel an argument that challenges
Christian doctrines. Not that he wants to get rid of religion, in
fact, he actually places a high value on it, because he thinks it
expresses, though in an inverted form, humanity's idea of its true
essence. Feuerbach argues that though religion represents human
creativity as if it depends on God, in reality God is just the
projection of an ideal image of humanity's own capacities. Feuerbach
goes back to optical metaphors to try to explain this inversion and
the projection of human potential into the idea of God saying it is
like “the double refraction of the rays of light.” Feuerbach
thought that if he could get people to change the way they
interpreted their own nature—to stop inverting their own potential
through a prism of false consciousness—then many of humanities
problems could be solved.

Karl
Marx, who came along shortly after Feuerbach, thought all this talk
about ideals and essences was flaky. Writing about Feuerbach, Marx
famously said “philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways; the point is to change it.” For Marx, the character
of human life doesn't come from contemplation of starry abstractions;
it comes from real-world activity. Marx thinks that Feuerbach makes a
big mistake in trying to improve human conditions by simply getting
people to think differently. In fact, for Marx putting ideas before
action (or in the lingo of philosophers, theory before praxis)
obscures our consciousness of our relationships to the world and each
other. To summarize the disagreement more succinctly: Feuerbach
thinks that abstract ideas
determine human the nature of human existence; but Marx thinks human
actions produce all
our ideas. The problem of false consciouness as Marx see it, is that
people (and I think he would include Feuerbach here) fail to see the
role active production plays in the formation of our ideas. But what
is so interesting to me is that Marx picks up, and even elaborates on
the optical tropes used by Feuerbach to make this point. In The
German Ideology Marx writes that
“men [sic] are the
produces of their conceptions, ideals, etc. [...] If in all ideology
men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a
camera-obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their
historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina
does from their physical life-process.”

Wouldn't
it be really interesting to trace these and other strains of thought
linking vision to false consciousness in relation to the development
of optical technologies such as the lens or the photograph or film?

I
think this kind of thesis would raise another question: is there
something fundamentally deceptive about seeing? Or on the contrary
can vision, or different visual technologies, ever reveal things
about our existence that are otherwise hidden? (Walter Benjamin makes
a really interesting argument to this effect in his essay The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
when he claims that film can reveal an “optical unconscious”...
more fodder for the thesis, I guess)

Anyway,
just in case this post isn't long enough already, Marx's mention of
the camera obscura lets me segue neatly into something really cool
here in Oxford: The Ashmolean Museum of Science.

They have a whole
collection of neat optical devices ranging from ancient
telescopes to early microscopes and primitive photographic
projectors. The coolest thing they have, however, is a functioning
camera obscura.

The name is Latin for 'dark chamber,' and it's basically
a way to project an image onto a surface. Lots of Renaissance artists
used them as drawing aides and Aristotle used a primitive form of the
principle to watch an eclipse, the old pinhole in a dixie cup from
grade school. This is a more advanced application of the same idea,
using lenses and mirrors (which is why in the image I show below isn't inverted in the way Marx mentions).

This is the aperture:

It looks out the window on to Broad Street.

And to see the image,
you poke your head under the sheet.

I really dig the ghostly quality of the camera obscura image. I feel like its a bit of a precursor to the appeal of sitting in a dark theater and watching a movie. If you ever get a chance to get into one, I recommend it.

December 10, 2008

This week I've been reading
an essay by Martin Heidegger for my Oxford tutorial on Aesthetics and
Critical Theory. In the essay, Heidegger asks a deceptively simple
question: what does a work of art do? As Heidegger sees it, art work
is about more than making something beautiful to hang on the wall. In
fact as Heidegger contends, art does nothing short of creating our
world. At first this sounds like quite a stretch—how can art create
a world? Heidegger holds up the example of a Greek temple as a kind
of art work to make this point. For the ancient Greeks, a temple was
not about its beauty; instead, the work of building and
consecrating a temple is about opening up a space for a collective
understanding of all the ups and downs of existence. In this sense,
the term “art work” has a kind of active connotation; it is a
process of making the world meaningful, of figuring out what it means
to be human in the context of other people and things at a given
time. The up shot of all of this (at least as I plan to argue to my
tutor) is that Heidegger presents us with a startling reversal of the
conventional wisdom that a given culture produce art. Instead, what
this essays seems to tell us is that it is in art work that we find
the positive enactment of a community. (I feel the jargon coming on,
so I'll stop with the bit about the temple.)

All of this becomes a little
bit more clear when Heidegger give us another gives us another
example by way of a painting of a peasant woman's shoes by Vincent Van Gogh.

On one level, Heidegger tells us that the shoes are merely
things—mute objects that don't hold any meaning. On another level,
the shoes mean something to the peasant they belong to—they are
every day things that are useful for walking around and keeping warm,
but she never really gives them a second thought. But here is the
important part: in the work of art, the shoes reveal the truth of not
just their own existence, but that of their surroundings, their
owner, and, as I think as Heidegger might argue, even us. Heidegger
unpacks all of this in a stunning passage.

From the dark opening of
the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares
forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the
accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and
ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather
lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the
loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates
the silent call of the earth , its quiet gift of the ripening grain
and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the
wintry fields.

Wow...

As much
as I like Heidegger's exegesis of the Van Gogh, it would be
disingenuous of me, looking at the painting in the 21st ,
to say that I see everything that Heidegger sees in the shoes. I have
a feeling that this is because I grew up in Chicago in the 1980's and
90's and, frankly, have had little experience “trudging in furrows”
or “toiling with ripening grain.” In short, I come from a
different world than the peasant woman implied by the painting. But
what happens in this case? What happens when we lose contact with the
context of the world and the community that art belongs to? I think
that Heidegger would say that when art stops being something that
makes sense of existence and no longer unites a community it becomes
a mere thing. In the paper I am writing for my tutorial I argue that
it is at this point—when we become disconnected from the world that
art creates—that we start to talk about beauty, aesthetics, and art
for art's sake. For an excellent example, I don't need to look too
far from Oxford. I'm thinking of the Elgin marbles, which were
removed from the Parthenon in Athens and brought to the British
Gallery in London in the 19th century.

When I
visit them in London, removed as they are from their context, I can
appreciate their form, their symmetry, their repose, but they will
never have the dynamic, living meaning for me as they would have for
Pericles gazing up on them from the Acropolis in the 5th
century BC. That deeper meaning of these works of art is lost to me.
They may be beautiful, but in many ways they are just dead stone,
just plain things.

This
reduction of art to its “thing” quality is also something I have
been exploring in my tutorial. The Van Gogh painting or the Elgin
marbles seem like “things” or plain old objects to me now, but
this is because the worlds they conjure up are alien as a result of
distances in space and the passing of time. But many recent critics
contend that even contemporary art works fails to go beyond being
merely things to reveal truths about the world. Many of these kinds
of claims cite Karl Marx and his work Capital. There Marx
argues that modern economies are able to exchange goods and labor by
thinking about everything in terms of equivalent things or, in
short, by objectifying everything into the form of commodities. Many
Marxist thinkers I have read in this term argue that this way of
thinking has penetrated almost every aspect of our consciousness,
including our art. The cultural critic Fredric Jameson does an
excellent job of illustrating this point by comparing Heidegger's
reading of Van Gogh's shoes to Diamond Dust Shoes, a painting
by Andy Warhol.

Unlike the Van Gogh, which conjures up a whole lived
experience, Jameson says that Warhol's shoes are a “random
collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so
many turnips, [...] shorn of their earlier life.” The Warhol shoes
exist superficially and we can't imagine them being worn or revealing
any profound truths about their world in the way that the peasant's
shoes do. Here, like in his famous soup can paintings, Warhol seems
to be examining the effects of commodification on works art.

All of
this is, of course, fascinating and, as any good set of readings
should, it leaves me with more questions than answers. Of few of them
being:

If
Heidegger is right and art really does “set up a world,” what are
the responsibilities of the artist? (This question seems even more
pressing when we consider the aestheticization of politics carried
out by the Nazis, with whom Heidegger was complicit)

Can we
ever truly understand the art of a bygone world? Do art works offer a
way to empathize with others from different times and places? And if
so couldn't this kind of empathy be counted among arts beautiful
qualities?

Has the
commodification of our modern (or postmodern world) eliminated the
possibility of authentic art as Heidegger sees it? If not what might
be some examples of authentic contemporary art works?

My name
is Heath Iverson. I'm a junior majoring in humanities at Shimer
College . Currently, I am taking part in the college's biannual
Shimer-in-Oxford program where I am studying continental philosophy,
art, and film. I came to Shimer two years ago after spending a few
really unsatisfying years at another college. My time at Shimer has
been the most challenging and stimulating of my life and has given me
so many opportunities to explore my own intellectual interests both
at home in Chicago and here in Britain with experts at Oxford
University and the National School of Film and Television. After
graduating next year I plan on pursuing a MA in moving image
archiving and preservation followed by a PhD in cinema studies.

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed by the Shimer bloggers are theirs alone, are subject to change upon each blogger's reflection, and do not reflect the opinions of Shimer College. Shimer is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any of the information supplied on this blog and strongly encourages you to contact the Shimer Admission Office directly if you have questions about Shimer. The entries on this blog belong to their authors and to Shimer College. Shimer encourages and deeply values discussion, but the college is not responsible for what is posted by commenters and reserves the right to delete any comment for any reason whatsoever. Deletions will likely be made if commentary is commercial, irrelevant, abusive, profane, rude, or destructively inaccurate. Shimer students on the regular staff of this blog are modestly compensated for their efforts.